Sonder’s Top Five Social Media Marketing Tools

04 Oct

If your company’s strategy is heavily based on social media marketing or even if it isn’t — social media management tools will change your life. Social media has had a steady rise in prominence in the marketing industry and marketers were hesitant at first. But now with 81% of millennials saying they check twitter once per day and 48.1% of Australians on Facebook… it’s hard to avoid.

Social media is an integral component to almost any company now, so we’ve put together a list of our five favourite social media management tools.

Hootsuite

Fiercely competing for first place in our little marketing hearts is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is an all encompassing SMM tool. It connects with something ridiculous like 35 different social platforms and it has a pretty good free plan. The free plan lets you connect three social media profiles, schedule up to 30 posts in advance, and view basic analytics. The analytics reporting covers the essentials, your growth in followers and content statistics. As far as free SMM plans go, Hootsuite’s is perfect if you’re just getting started or you’re a go-it-alone social media manager for your team.

Buffer

Next up is Buffer, it’s another all-encompassing social media management tool like Hootsuite but it provides a few more features. Buffer does offer a free plan but their paid plans come with so much to get excited about. The starting plan at $15 a month gets your marketing team a single user account with the option for eight linked profiles and 100 posts per month.

This one provides cool insights, Buffer will analyse your followers’ social activity and suggest the ideal time for you to post for maximum engagement. It has an inbuilt image and GIF creator. Plus, browser plugins (to schedule later content), and mobile apps — perfect for the busy social media manager. With other added benefits like link shortening and tracking, social analytics, and inbuilt calendars, this tool is a really neat choice.

Photo Credit: Buffer

Sprout

Sprout is a little bit different to the others. It keeps the same core features as the others; analytics and tracking, impressions and link clicks, and post scheduling. It mixes things up by adding in ‘all-in-one’ scheduling and social inboxes so you can better manage ongoing conversations with customers or industry partners.

But the coolest thing about Sprout is that it works by analysing your followers and suggests corresponding keywords, hashtags, and engaging content ideas. This one’s a bit more extensive and the price reflects that, coming in at $99 a month for a single user account.

Photo Credit: Sprout Social

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is only really helpful if your social media strategy is strongly driven by Twitter. If it is, then this will be your own lil’ miracle. TweetDeck is a dashboard application that originated as an independent application but was soon co-opted by Twitter.

It gives you the flexibility to manage multiple profiles and multiple conversations. It’s heavily based on the idea of having multiple feeds. So you can have your notifications in one feed, your DMs in another, keep your own feed, and follow a hashtag or trending topic in another.

Social Pilot

Lastly but not leastly, Social Pilot is the ideal in collaborative social media management. This SMM tool gives you the freedom to manage multiple accounts and schedule your posts all at once or use different queues for content. You can get crazy organised with its scheduling calendar, inbuilt social inbox, and custom feeds. This SMM tool delivers relevant content and assists you in discovering related brands and accounts.